Quotes about Youth

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.

Most people feel younger than their age, but the culture values youth, success, beauty, productivity. There is no space in this culture for older people.

Whoever knows you when you are young can look inside you and see the person you once were, and maybe still are at certain times.

You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms -- those poor creatures don't know the first thing about time or agony or the price they're going to have to pay for just about everything.

When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you.

Your grand daughter may not be looking for trouble, but trouble is looking for her.

Meg was a great reader and was never without a book; while walking to school she often had one open in her hands, so engrossed she would sometimes trip while navigating familiar streets.

Haylin was given a good talking-to by the headmaster and made to write a paper about workers' rights, which he considered a privilege rather than a punishment. He was obligated to write ten pages, and handed in a tome of nearly fifty pages instead, duly footnoted, quoting from Thomas Paine and FDR. He couldn't wait for the next decade. Everything would change in the sixties, he told Franny. And, if they were lucky, they would then be free.

You're so rebellious as it is." "I am not!" Franny said with her customary defiance

He wasn't the first man she'd been with, and that hadn't been Bill back home either. It had been a boy she met on holiday when she was fifteen. She had decided it was time for her to have sex, the way someone else might decide it was time to get a driver's license, and she'd gone ahead with it. Pragmatic, that's the way she'd always been.

In their estimation Gillian was young and stupid and would get herself pregnant in record time—all the prerequisites for a miserable and ordinary life.

They both always wished for the same thing when they were sitting on the roof of the aunts' house on those hot, lonely nights. Sometime in the future, when they were both all grown up, they wanted to look up at the stars and not be afraid. This is the night they had wished for. This is that future, right now. And they can stay out as long as they want to, they can remain on the lawn until every star has faded, and still be there to watch the perfect blue sky at noon.